


Starships (were made to fly)

by TheWrongKindOfPC



Series: life! life! eternity! [3]
Category: The Mechanisms (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - High School, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-21
Updated: 2021-02-21
Packaged: 2021-03-18 16:15:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,553
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29612055
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheWrongKindOfPC/pseuds/TheWrongKindOfPC
Summary: “Oh yeah?” Jonny asks. “Who died and made you emotionally intelligent, Miss I-Only-Love-My-Car?”
Relationships: Jonny d'Ville & Nastya Rasputina
Series: life! life! eternity! [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2153655
Comments: 19
Kudos: 47





	Starships (were made to fly)

**Author's Note:**

> here, I made you some more Horrible Teens. enjoy!

Nastya’s never had a mini-me before. She’s sure that Jonny would fight her on the characterization, but that doesn’t change the fact that it fits. The day Carmilla picks him up at his father’s house and brings him home with her, he launches himself out of the car before it’s really even stopped moving, like he’s as combustion-engine-powered as Carmilla’s rust-bucket of a Jeep that Nastya is absolutely going to be getting her hands on the engine of sooner rather than later. He holds out his hand to her to shake like he’s a used car salesman or the romantic lead in a screwball comedy — a personality detached from time or reality — and says “I’m Jonny d’Ville,” all defiant, like he’s expecting Nastya to fight him on it. And, just like that, poof, Nastya’s got a mini-me, a tag-along, a little brother.

Jonny is Carmilla’s nephew and Nastya is Carmilla’s ex-stepkid, which doesn’t make Jonny anything in particular to Nastya, actually, except — through a convoluted and depressing series of events — her unexpected housemate. But that doesn’t stop Jonny from trailing her around the house stealing her nail polish and trying to gossip with her about the characters on soap operas she doesn’t watch. It’s kind of annoying, but it’s also kind of sweet, and when Carmilla asks, a few weeks into their unorthodox little household, how Nastya’s managing with him, she’s tempted to say, _he’s a good kid_.

She doesn’t, because he absolutely is not, but the momentary urge is there.

Instead, she says that he’s alright, and that she hasn’t seen any real signs of the hell-on-wheels behavior which lead his father to ask Carmilla if she’d keep an eye on him for a while. Of course, that could and does change a bit when the school year begins, but Nastya doesn’t hear that much about it because she’s pretty well distracted by her own new-school-new-start by then.

The school’s auto shop vocational program is part of why she’s moved down to live with Carmilla, and all of the reason she’s said out loud to anyone _except_ for Carmilla, and it turns out to be as good as she’d hoped for. She’s got engine grease beneath her fingernails by the end of her first day in the voc training program, and a few days after _that_ , she’s got an after-school job to add to the mix, too, because she’s going to get herself a permit, a license, and a car, all on as fast of a timeline as she can physically and legally manage. Staying in one place is a great way to get stuck there, and Nastya intends to live her life fast enough to never get caught in a trap like that.

So she’s a little distracted, when Jonny starts getting home later, which could be a sign either of a social life or of trouble at school. When he starts getting home earlier again sometimes, but bringing a friend, that doesn’t actually clear the ambiguity up. Ashes O’Reilly is absolutely someone Jonny might have met in detention because, Nastya notes with a little amused admiration, she’s not sure she’s ever met a kid who’s so clearly and completely trouble as Ashes is. But for the same reason, she has this sneaking feeling that Jonny’s been disappearing lately to convince Ashes that he, too, is enough trouble to be worth noticing, and she suspects that the fact that they’re both here now is a sign that he’s finally succeeded.

Then, one day, a week or two after that, there’s a third kid with them, this one with a clumsy, fire-engine-red dye job that Nastya vaguely recognizes from the school library, and after that, it’s like the floodgates are open, and Nastya can’t move for tripping over teenagers when she gets back from her shift at the corner store some nights.

“It’s really Ashes they’ve followed here, not me,” Jonny explains. 

Ashes smiles all knife-sharp and says, “Yeah, well, some of us had friends in middle school, d’Ville.”

Nastya tenses a little bit at that — Jonny’s an obnoxious little shit, but he’s her mini-me, and she has no interest in seeing his armor pierced by this new little nuisance who’s currently drawing a proposed design for an experimental stick-and-poke on the top of their foot.

Jonny doesn’t seem bothered by it, though, and Nastya tries to hold back for half a second before she gives in and warns Ashes, “That’s going to hurt like hell, right over the bone like that. You’ve never done this before, right?”

At Ashes’ quiet little head-bob of acknowledgement, Nastya sinks down beside them on the ugly orange-red carpet of Carmilla’s basement floor, takes the ballpoint, and says, “Here, try it over here, at least this first time,” before sketching out a rough outline of Ashes’ previous design somewhere with a bit more muscle. And just like that, Nastya goes from having one mini-me to a whole flock of sullen, gothy little ducklings.

…

It’s perfect, the car, and Nastya knows it’s meant to be hers in her bones from the moment she sees it. She tries not to show the seller how instantly smitten she is, and she does her due diligence checking for rust and making sure everything under the hood is as it should be, but she knows from the moment she claps eyes on it that it’s coming home with her, and when she finally signs for it, she feels this wild rush of correctness, like the world is falling into place around her.

Jonny and the others all knew where Nastya was going this afternoon, so she’s not surprised when they’re all hanging around the driveway by the time she drives back. She feels halfway obliged to put on a show of being annoyed about the nosiness of it, but mostly she’s just overtaken by the thrill of getting to show her new treasure off right away. She pulls into the driveway, and it’s a dream. She hops down, and in front of her, the shimmering expanse of the new car gleams.

“Are they letting you take it for a test drive?” Ashes asks, sounding a little skeptical. 

Nastya turns to face them and knows that there’s a probably-goofy-looking grin stretching across her face as she rushes to explain, “No — well, yeah, but this isn’t it, I did that earlier. No, this is — I bought it, this is my car!”

She casts a bright, darting look over the assembled teenagers. Ashes is smirking a little, Nastya thinks. As she’s looking, Jonny wrinkles his nose a little and says, “It’s pink.”

Ashes nudges him in the ribs with their elbow, asking, “Got a problem with pink, d’Ville?”

“Pink and iridescent,” he goes on. “It’s like — it’s like that Disney princess, the sleeping one.”

“Don’t act like you’re too cool to know she’s called Sleeping Beauty,” Ashes needles, happy enough to let go of their own skepticism over Nastya’s new sparkly pink minivan for the chance to needle Jonny about his skepticism.

Sleeping Beauty wasn’t the cartoon fairytale princess Nastya thought of when she thought about the freedom of the road and the wide-open future she was busy building for herself, but now that Jonny has said it, she can definitely see it. She looks back at the car, silly grin still on her face, and corrects, “No, the _movie_ is called _Sleeping Beauty_. The _princess_ is called Aurora. And now so is my car.”  
Brian smiles at her and says, “Great choice, you’ve got tons of storage, and I bet she gets an excellent safety rating.” 

…

While Nastya’s not paying too much attention, Jonny’s friends start to multiply.

“I thought you were an antisocial little shit,” Carmilla says. “I specifically told your father I wasn’t up for any den mother crap and he told me not to worry, that you were more of a lock-yourself-alone-in-your-room kind of kid.”

She’s not really annoyed, Nastya doesn’t think — Jonny’s friends mostly scatter when Carmilla gets home from work, for one thing, and for another, Carmilla and Jonny are enough alike that Nastya is beginning to suspect that Carmilla likes to have an audience now and then.

Jonny holds his arms out in an ironic, ostentatious shrug and says, “I can’t help having a magnetic personality.”

It’s a joke — ish, but it’s also true that while alone Jonny comes across as a hyperactive oddball with an occasionally crudely morbid sense of humor, with Ashes by his side providing their own brand of adolescent posturing, there’s something a bit more imposing about their combined aura. Still, Brian and Ivy are mostly there because they were friends with Ashes first, so really, the first of their friends who can really be said to have been drawn in by Jonny’s personality is the Toy Soldier.

Nastya isn’t totally sure what to make of the Toy Soldier who, when asked what it’s doing there, cheerfully volunteers, “I followed him home!” with a jerk of its thumb in Jonny’s direction.

“And now it won’t go away!” Jonny volunteers, but he’s grinning, too, so Nastya isn’t too concerned.

“You shouldn’t call people ‘it,’” she tells him, more because she feels like she should than because she really cares that much. “Even if they do stalk you home under cover of darkness.”

The Toy Soldier — who Nastya still, in this moment, knows only vaguely as Jess Law, that scary kid in JROTC who is rumored to be a good enough marksman to have been sent to some kind of competition over the summer before even matriculating as a freshman and enough of a wild card to have gotten disqualified for undefined “unsportsmanlike behavior” before even having the chance to take a single shot — slides over the back of the couch in Carmilla’s basement to crash head-first into the cushion next to where Nastya is sitting and look up at her, eyes and smile both still impossibly wide, and trill, “I don’t mind, truly! I think I like it better than any of the other options.”

…

Nastya wouldn’t describe herself as religious, but she’d started going to Unitarian events with her second-best ex-step-mother when she was six, and the community in her hometown, where her father lives, still welcomes her back for events there pretty much as often as she chooses to drop in. The UUs tend to host pretty good queer teen meet-ups, which is handy because Nastya does, actually, occasionally like to entertain the idea that some day she might kiss someone, and if and when that day comes, she loves the idea that it’ll be somewhere out of town and far away from anything her vocational training classmates, her friends, or her nosy little brother might hear about.

Now that she’s got wheels of her own, every now and then she leaves the little ones to their own devices of a Sunday afternoon and points Aurora’s wheels forty-five minutes out of town, back to the suburb-of-a-suburb where her father lives. For the price of a few hymns and a few nosy church leaders trying to figure out her dad’s marital situation, Nastya gets middling-decent cookies, a vaguely awkward sense of community, and a chance to meet Rory, Mika, and Scuzz.

It’s good, having another life to get to drift into now and then, and she doesn’t quite realize how often she’s started going until Jonny starts joking about how Nastya’s been sneaking off to see her secret girlfriend, and Carmilla looks up with a question in her eyes, like it’s a possibility.

“Nah,” Nastya tells them, a little discomfited by their twin facial expressions of interest, “You know the one true love of my life is Aurora.”

It’s a little bit of a calculated sally, and Nastya’s lucky enough that Jonny takes the bait and starts making kissy noises and jokes about how she’ll electrocute herself on a spark-plug.

…

Jonny invited Tim, so Nastya can see why Ashes and the others might have expected that Jonny’d be nicer to him, but she herself has always known better than to expect Jonny to be happy about liking someone. Which is all to say that Nastya is not surprised when Jonny needles Tim about something that anyone with a scrap of sensitivity would know really ought to be left alone, and keeps needling until he breaks.

After Tim bolts, Jonny follows Ashes home to shoot cans off a fence out back behind their uncle’s garage until they get kicked out, and Nastya doesn’t see him for a few hours. When he does come back, grumbling and bedraggled and damp enough to make it obvious that he got caught in a late spring shower on his way home, Nastya has had enough time to think of what she wants to say about it. She pats the top step of the stoop, where she’s sitting just beneath the awning by the front door, and after a moment, Jonny sits.

“If you try it again,” she tries, “I’d pick your moment a little better.”

“The moment was the point,” Jonny grumbles, fidgeting like if Nastya was Ashes, or if they weren’t right in front of Carmilla’s house, he’d have a cigarette in his hand already.

“Why, because you’re trying to recreate the porno-parody of _Fight Club_?”

“They have one of those?”

“‘Course they have one of those,” Nastya’s not in the mood to be distracted, not really, but this feels obvious to her, “The original practically was it, it’d be a waste for no one to go the last step.”

Jonny shrugs in what she’s pretty sure is concession, so she gets back to the point. “I know you like the idea of yourself as this unfeeling little monster, but if you screw that kid up worse than he was when you got him, I have this feeling you’re going to feel bad about it.”

“Oh yeah?” Jonny picks up a pebble from off the stoop and throws it down onto the sidewalk, watching it bounce away instead of meeting her eyes. “Who died and made you emotionally intelligent, Miss I-Only-Love-My-Car?”

The thing about that is that Aurora is, in fact, the best car. Still, he’s got something bordering on a point, there. She says, “But I really _really_ love my car,” partially to make him laugh and partially because she does, actually, think the distinction is important. It’s the people who really think they don’t love anything that’ll get you in the worst trouble.

Then, because she’s said what she thinks she needed to, and because she does know that Aurora isn’t actually the only thing she cares about, she sighs and leans over to tug lightly on one of the fly-aways sticking out from behind the folded bandana he’s got tied around his head. “You ever think about growing this out?”

“Nastya,” he says, whining just a little and head-butting her companionably in the shoulder, “You know I don’t like to think about things.”

…

And then she’s a senior, and it’s what Nastya has been waiting for all along, her ticket out, she can feel a buzzing under her skin just thinking about finding a completely new city, getting her hands on some new machines, assembling herself something like a whole new life all knotted together under her selfsame skin. The year crashes past like the freight trains that send them all scrambling off the tracks at the sound of the bell as they make their way along the railway ditches when the weather’s nice, and before Nastya knows it, she’s ignoring the form that’s been handed to her so she can fill in her yearbook quote.

She tries to send it slipping down into crumpled obscurity at the bottom of her bag, but Jonny fishes it out when he’s going through her backpack to steal some of her lunch. He says, “I could fill it in for you.”

“Absolutely not,” she tells him, snatching it back, although a part of her thinks it’d probably do no harm to let him. She doesn’t intend on buying a yearbook, and she doesn’t intend on staying in touch with anyone who will, so how the book remembers her really isn’t her concern. Still, Jonny thinks he understands Camus this week, and Nastya thinks it’s probably her duty to the world at large to keep him from picking out a yearbook quote until that passes.

“We really ought to put together our own spiffing little book, anyway,” the Toy Soldier says, lying back on the tiled floor of the classroomless hallway they’ve taken to having lunch in during the winter when it’s too cold to avoid the cafeteria by sitting outside. “Just pictures of us and anyone else who matters in it. Marius’s Shakespeare cult thing—”

“Drama club,” Marius corrects, and the Toy Soldier salutes like he’s scored a point.

“—Drama cult, yes. And Ivy’s pet librarian and maybe a picture of the good little soldier boys and girls for Tim because knowing thine enemy is important, and Dr. P’s graveyard of souls, and our lunch tree.”

Nastya doesn’t quite have the heart to tell it that it’s veering perilously close to just reinventing scrapbooking, especially not when the Toy Soldier’s recitation of all of the important parts of their little world for the last few years has her feeling a weird pang of melancholy. Instead, she says, “Aurora better get her own page.”

The Toy Soldier nods enthusiastically, smearing its hair against the floor tiles faintly stained with the dust from the salt on the ground outside keeping the walkways from getting too icy. Jonny says, “Okay, well, can I pick your yearbook quote for that one?”

…

She should be expecting it, probably, but she isn’t. It’s the night after Nastya’s graduation, or the early morning after the night after, and their bonfire has burned down to embers and lazy, sputtering blue flames, and the Toy Soldier and Raphaella and Marius and Ivy have all gone home for the night, and Brian is idly picking out a melody of Marius’s abandoned acoustic and paying the rest of them no attention, and Ashes is methodically feeding every page of notes they’ve written in class all year into the flames, and Tim’s fallen asleep close enough to the fire that Nastya is keeping half an eye out to make sure a stray spark doesn’t set his hair on fire, and Jonny doesn’t look Nastya in the eye, but he does ask her, “But you’ll come back sometimes, though, won’t you?” and Nastya is completely blindsided by the question.

She’s thrown because Jonny ought to know better than anyone that she doesn’t believe in looking back, but when she doesn’t answer, Jonny goes on, uncharacteristically hesitant, “Carmilla wouldn’t mind, I don’t think, god knows she likes you better—”

“Jonny—”

“Not that I mind,” he presses on, words all tripping over each other in their hurry to get out, and Nastya hates this, hates it. “She can like anyone she wants obviously and you’re the likable one anyway — or you’re the motivated one, which is maybe the same thing if you’re Carmilla, not that you are. And it wouldn’t need to be very often, or anything, but I know Marius would want you to see that—that whatsit, that stupid show he wants us all to do, the battle of the bands thing, and—”

“Jonny.” Nastya doesn’t like to let that much feeling get into her tone, but since it’s there anyway, she’s glad that it’s enough to shut him up this time. “I don’t think so. But you should definitely come to see me.”

That brings him up short, startles him enough that he actually turns and looks her in the eye. “I—how?” he asks. “You know you’re usually my ride.”

And the next thing she does — the next thing Nastya does isn’t the plan she’s been forming in her mind since she was twelve and miserable and desperate to get out of the town she grew up in, looking up state high school vocational programs online on the beige dinosaur of a desktop computer at the public library and then cross-referencing the list of them against the locations of every adult relative or potentially sympathetic family friend she can think of. It’s not the image of that plan that crystalized in her mind on the first day she saw Aurora, and it’s not the dream she’s been working towards every day since then, but all of the sudden, she thinks it’s better. She digs through her pocket, fishes out her keys, and then slides one particular, star-silver key off the ring and hands it to Jonny.

“Take good care of her, okay?” she says after a moment, when he still hasn’t said anything.

It’s enough to break the spell. Jonny takes the key from Nastya, looks down at it, looks back up at her, then says, “You know TS and Ashes are going to lobby for flame-decals all down the side of her.”

Nastya does, in fact, know that, but she doesn’t think it’s the end of the world — change is what this next step is all about, after all. She’s pretty sure the month before her first job interview is scheduled is long enough to give her a solid head-start on getting herself a motorcycle license, anyway.


End file.
